Doctors and nurses in the United States are pretty used to brutally long work days. But is it the only or best way to practice medicine in a hospital? First of all, I think we should all ask the question, “How did we get here?” Well, the American practice of having doctors work long hours started with William Halsted, the first chief of surgery at … Read More Are Long Hours Killing Doctors, Nurses and Patients?

“Is your wife one of those people who will go along with it? Just sign him up for the surgery and you can go home and discuss it with her later.” My husband had come to a prominent teaching hospital in Southern California affiliated with the Seventh Day Adventist faith seeking orthotic braces for our son. Instead, he was getting a hard sell for … Read More Bioethics Is Not A Sequel To A Pauly Shore Movie

Frank Herbert’s epic sci-fi novel Dune chronicles humanity’s interstellar civilization thousands of years into the future. (If you read it, you’ll notice more than a few similarities between Dune and Star Wars: A New Hope. George Lucas was very inspired by Dune and his initial versions of Star Wars were more of a reworking of it. Once he used a little more Force and a little less spice, the whole thing really … Read More The Butlerian Jihad and Maternal Health

Have you ever noticed that parents get an awful lot of education about Shaken Baby Syndrome? We’re told all the time never to shake our babies- though any other form of abuse is rarely talked about. Have you ever stopped to ask why shaking is such an issue rather than just child abuse in general? It’s actually a rather strange story. Shaken Baby Syndrome … Read More Shaken Baby Syndrome: A Public Health Issue Looking For Evidence

Have you ever heard about how the “Titans of Industry” in the Gilded Age made so. much. money? It’s because there was so little regulation on big business and the treatment of workers at the time. If you wanted to pay your workers an un-livable wage and work them 12 hours a day, 6 days a week under dangerous conditions, there was nothing to … Read More Europe has nationalized healthcare, America has GoFundMe, here’s why